Introduction: contexts and paradigms for ecological engagement

Introduction: contexts and paradigms for ecological engagement
Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai 0
0 Tamkang University , Tamsui District, New Taipei City , Taiwan
In The future of environmental criticism, Buell (2005) proffers a cognitive mapping of the future of ecocriticism in terms of the two-wave palimpsestic ''trend-lines'' of environmental criticism. To follow up on Buell's observations of environmental twists and turns, Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson go a step further to welcome more inclusive wave theories of ecocriticism at the present time by ushering in ''a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries,'' an attempt that ''explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint'' (Adamson and Slovic 2009, pp. 6-7).1 In their adumbration, Adamson and Slovic feature those global concepts of place melding with neo-bioregionalism, such as eco-cosmopolitanism, translocality, post-national and post-ethnic comparative studies of ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and polymorphous activism, as a means to debunk the nature-culture binary. For both ecocritics, ''material'' ecofeminism stands as one component of the third wave of ecocriticism. 1 In ''Problems and Prospects in Ecocritical Pedagogy,'' Gregory Garrad also recapitulates ecocriticism and environmental education in terms of Buell's two-wave theory of ecocriticism. See Garrard (2010, pp. 233-245).
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Introduction
I want to express my deep gratitude to Professor Priscilla Wald for her comment and suggestion, which
are of great help in revising the manuscript.
More recently, however, influenced by the rapid ascendancy of the
interdisciplinary environmental humanities, ecocritics have been moving beyond notions of
the wave paradigm. In the ‘‘Introduction’’ to Humanities for the environment:
integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, Adamson reconsiders
the field genealogies of ecocriticism, and other disciplines that are contributing to
the expanding importance of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Since
the entangled disciplinary fields that find confluence in the environmental
humanities are arguably much older than the early 1990s dates usually given to
the emergence of a ‘‘first wave’’ of environmental literary criticism, many
ecofeminists, and environmental justice, postcolonial, ethnic, and Indigenous
studies scholars are arguing that we must trace our intellectual genealogies back
much further. The roots of ecocriticism might be found, in fact, in some of the
‘‘earliest cosmological narratives, stories and symbols among the world’s oldest
cultures’’
(Adamson 2017, p. 5)
. These cosmologies tell not only of cultural origins,
they tell of entangled human and nonhuman worlds, resistance or revolts in the
colonial world, and suggest incisive critiques of imperialism, Western science, and
Western religions. Tracing the roots of ecocriticism beyond a dual, or even tertiary
wave paradigm more satisfyingly buttresses the most recent directions of
ecocriticism, including material ecocriticism.
The ‘‘paradigm shift’’ that best describes the development of ecocriticism,
Adamson and others, including Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, have
suggested, is a tangled root system growing in many directions at once. We see
references to the rhizome or root systems and entanglement in Stacy Alaimo’s
theorization of the ‘‘material turn’’ in Bodily natures (2010), Greta Gaard, Simon C.
Estok and Serpil Oppermann’s International perspectives in feminist ecocriticism
(2013), Helen Feder’s Ecocriticism and the idea of culture: Biology and the
bildungsroman (2014), and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s co-edited
book Material ecocriticism (2014). Together with the most recent speculative
realism movement, this work is also illuminating a shift in ecocriticism in the
direction of new materialisms that foresees ‘‘an extensive conversation across the
territories of the sciences and the humanities’’ in recent years, encompassing fields
such as ‘‘philosophy, quantum physics, biology, sociology, feminist theories,
anthropology, archaeology, and cultural studies’’
(Iovino and Oppermann 2014,
p. 2)
. Reflecting recent developments in ecocriticism and the emergence of
competing paradigms within the field, we have included papers exploring diverse
new trends as situated in national and transnational contexts, and in broad cultural
and cosmological contexts that delve into new materialisms.
In this special issue, most of the essays were originally delivered as conference
papers at the ‘‘Sixth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse,’’
hosted by the English Department at Tamkang University’s Tamsui campus. The
conference theme was ‘‘Speculative Materialism: Contexts and Paradigms for
Ecological Engagement,’’ with a special focus on new approaches to environmental
issues and cultural engagements. All the papers included here attempt to generate
discussions on local approaches to new materialisms in all their forms in the context
of literary and cultural production so as to advance dialogues between new
ecomaterialists and related interrogations of materialism in science, literature, and
philosophy.
As a timely utterance among recent ecocritical explorations, ‘‘Speculative
Materialism: Contexts and Paradigms for Ecological Engagement’’ will serve as an
important landmark in the fourth wave of ecocriticism which recognizes material
agencies in a universe of things by rebutting the centrality of humanism that
underestimates the nonhuman others. As we know, discourses related to ‘‘thing,’’
‘‘object’’ and ‘‘matter’’ argue against the ‘‘inequality’’ of power distribution: That
agency [the capacity to act] is understood only as a human property is dubious. In
the wake of post-structuralism, a comparatively systematic approach to this type of
materiality studies principally springs from the international conference
‘‘Speculative Realism’’ held by University of London on April 4, 2007, where a new
generation of philosophers and scholars, including Graham Harman, Quentin
Meillassoux, Levi Bryant, and Iain H. Grant, took ‘‘Speculative Realism’’ as the
research topic for the conference, and attempted from different critical angles to
probe into the ontology of ‘‘objects’’ to move away from the unknowable
‘‘thing-initself’’.2 According to Harman (2013, p. 5), speculative realism comes from Ray
Brassier’s idea that it is possible to think about reality without having recourse to a
[human] subject or consciousness.3 For these speculative realists, speculative
realism turns away from ‘‘correlationism’’
(Harman 2013, p. 5)
, subscribing to the
belief that ‘‘the world around us is real,’’ that ‘‘objects can be independent of human
perception,’’ that ‘‘objects are not linguistic construction’’
(Bryant et al. 2011,
p. 13)
, and that objects are not ‘‘for us.’’ However, being a Sellarsian transcendental
naturalist, Ray parts company with Harman in that the former is an anti-scientist
while the latter subscribes to the ideas of representation and objective truth
(Bryant
et al. 2011, p. 417)
.
Harman is a promulgator of this speculative realist movement. In ‘‘Postscript:
Speculative Autopsy,’’ Ray Brassier regards Harman as an ‘‘indefatigable midwife’’
of speculative realism
(Brassier 2014, p. 408)
. Here ‘‘realism’’ means things exist
‘‘as they are’’ and ‘‘they are utterly independent of our being’’ (Meillassoux 2008,
p. 29), while ‘‘speculative’’ denotes ‘‘pre-critical,’’ ‘‘pre-individual,’’ and an
adventure of ideas that might still be ‘‘controlled by the requirements of coherence
and logic,’’ as suggested by A. N. Whitehead who assumes that ‘‘speculative’’ is a
method of ‘‘imaginative rationalization’’ attempting to ‘‘frame a coherent, logical,
necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience
can be interpreted’’
(Whitehead 1978, p. 3)
.
In spite of these shared non-anthropocentric concerns, Harman nevertheless
asserts that ‘‘direct knowledge of anything is impossible’’ in principal part because
2 See ‘‘The transcendental concept of appearances in space […] is a critical reminder that nothing
intuited in space is a thing in itself, that space is not a form inhering in things in themselves as their
intrinsic property, that objects in themselves are quite unknown but mere representations of our
sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in
experience no questions ever asked in regard to it’’
(Kant 1929, p. 74)
.
3 According to Meillassoux, speculative realism means to know ‘‘whether it’s possible to access an
absolute that’s capable of being thought, not as a relative and cloistered outside, but as a Great Outdoors
whose essence is irrelative to the thought of the knower’’
(qtd. in Gratton 2014, p. 13)
.
the true nature of object is its ‘‘withdrawal’’
(Harman 2013, p. 75)
. For Harman and
others, the thing in itself is not unknowable; rather, we can still speculate on it. At
the outset, speculative realism is a term for generating ‘‘a discourse on the nature of
reality’’
(Brassier et al. 2007, p. 308)
, but its practices have become diverse and
polyvocal as we know it. Thus they developed the theory of thing/object/matter so
that we can have new angles or methodologies whereby to enter in. All in all, these
speculative realist approaches to literature include: (1) new materialisms (Gilles
Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari and their followers, such as E. DeLanda, Rosi Braidotti,
Jane Bennett and others); (2) dialectical materialism (Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zˇ izˇek
and their follower Adrian Johnston); (3) speculative materialism (Quinten
Meillassoux); (4) machine-oriented ontology (Levi Bryant); (5) actor-network
theory (Bruno Latour); (6) object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman and Timothy
Morton); (7) agential realism (Karen Barad); (8) thing theory (Bill Brown); (9)
plastic materialism (Catherine Malabou), and so on. Among these ecocritical
perspectives, we choose ‘‘Speculative materialism’’ as the theme of the ‘‘Sixth
Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse’’ mainly because we
think it might help steer away from ‘‘the linguistic turn’’ that highlights the
importance of language, consciousness, and representation while endorsing
nonhuman material agencies and their agentic powers. This critical line of thought
orients itself toward a speculative-material turn, pinpointing that the linguistic turn
is susceptible of the ‘‘epistemic fallacy,’’ the pitfall of which either reduces
‘‘ontological questions to epistemological questions’’ or conflates ‘‘questions of how
we know’’ with ‘‘questions of what beings are’’
(Bryant 2011, p. 60)
. Meillassoux
even questions human access to ‘‘being’’ based on the correlation between thinking
and world, and ‘‘never either term [is] considered apart from each other’’ (2008,
p. 5).
In line with ecocriticism, Meillassoux’s ‘‘speculative materialism’’ is not na¨ıve
realism, but a form of ‘‘critical’’ realism aiming at freeing ‘‘the in-self’’ from
anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism. As one subset of speculative realism,
speculative materialism, which is in consonance with object-oriented philosophy
and other similar approaches, tries to undermine ‘‘correlationism,’’ in that the
virtuality/potentiality of an object/matter/thing can be emancipated from human
constraint, domination, and manipulation. Quentin Meillassoux cautions that if we
want to break free from the domination of (humanist) thought over (nonhuman)
objects, we need to disentangle the subject–object correlation. In an interview, he
comments that.
Correlationism takes many forms, but particularly those of transcendental
philosophy, the varieties of phenomenology, and post-modernism. But
although these currents are all extraordinarily varied in themselves, they all
share, according to me, a more or less explicit decision: that there are no
objects, no events, no laws, no beings which are not always–already correlated
with a point of view, with a subjective access.4
4 Qtd. in Gratton (2014, p. 14).
For Meillassoux, ‘‘speculative materialism’’ aims at going beyond the ‘‘weak’’
correlationism of Kantian transcendental philosophy of idealism, the ‘‘strong’’
correlationism of Heideggerian facticity of correlationism and (anthropocentric)
theory of intentionality (for example: ‘‘every consciousness is consciousness of
[…]’’),5 and the linguistic turn of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Drawing on
Meillassoux’s insights, an object is not to be regarded as matter of fact, but as matter
of concern. In After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency, for ecocritics,
perhaps we could learn from speculative materialism in three important aspects: (1)
it goes beyond the humanist nature–culture binary; (2) it welcomes nonhuman
forces, agencies, and speculative grace; (3) it is a discursive material formation
through which the condition of possibility and impossibility of material agencies is
acted out. Having said this, speculative materialism might arguably be looked at as
one of the sources of inspiration that can help us revisit the contexts and paradigms
of our ecological engagement.
All the essays in this issue touch on one or more facets of speculative
materialism, or speculative realism in general, such as matter, agency, genes,
animals, trees, ecosophic objects, food, cancer, radiation ecologies, vegetal
violence, climate change, and intra-relational finites in contemporary literary and
cultural texts, focusing on nations and cultures surrounding East Asia, Europe, and
the North Pacific Ocean. Scholars from Turkey, Italy, Korea, Hungary, and Taiwan
offer multifaceted perspectives on a variety of themes such as new materialism,
dialectical materialism, indigenous traditions, animal studies, and other ecological
issues.
The first cluster of four essays explore material ecocriticism, ecological and
environmental issues: Serpil Oppermann, Simon C. Estok, Serenella Iovino, and
Yalan Chang. In addition, Simon C. Estok, Serenella Iovino, and Yalan Chang also
discuss the anthropocene with reference to the human species as a geological force
that is now altering the planet’s biosphere and the environment. Though the
anthropocene discourse poses more problems than it solves, it is still germane to the
discussion of the relationship between the human and the environment. In 2000,
Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer first used it as a geological term to denote
‘‘the central role of mankind in geology and ecology’’ (2016, p. 17). In the 2002
essay ‘‘Geology of Mankind,’’ Crutzen defines the term Anthropocene as ‘‘the
present […] human-dominated, geological epoch’’
(Crutzen 2002, p. 23)
, implying
that the terraforming capability of humankind in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution can lead to environmental changes. He points out that the age of the
Anthropocene was activated when James Watt invented the steam engine in 1784,
the year that marks the prelude of the age of humankind. For Crutzen, the core
concern of the Anthropocene is with environmental disruptions leading up to
ecological crises, such as exploitation of Earth’s resources, the human population
problem, the loss of tropical rainforests, dam-building, agricultural fertilizers, the
emissions of greenhouses gases, the release of toxic substances, the depletion of the
5 Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology tries to collapse things-for-us (phenomenon) and
things-inthemselves (noumena). However, he is not interested in an object’s independence from human’s
perception since his theory of equipment is still based on ‘‘holism,’’ meaning that man and tools are
systemically embedded (Braver 2014, pp. 32–34).
ozone layer, and so on. For Crutzen and Stoermer, humans are a ‘‘major geological
force’’; therefore, they are expected to battle against these ‘‘human induced
stress[es]’’ as ‘‘one of the great future tasks of man’’
(Crutzen 2002, p. 23)
. This line
of remedial thinking is similar to what environmental sociologists, such as Niklas
Luhmann, Ulrick Beck, Bruno Latour, have to say in their risk analysis. Crutzen’s
ideas hint at a change of mindset, the human-regulating power, and species
cobelonging in the face of an upcoming climate change. Here, the Anthropocene
‘‘reenters’’ as a new epoch that emphasizes environment changes brought about by
humans’ terraforming powers. Since humankind as a geological force has
contributed to potential global catastrophes, Crutzen concludes that ‘‘[a] daunting
task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally
sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene’’
(Crutzen 2002, p. 23)
.
From Turkey, Serpil Oppermann begins her article, ‘‘Nature’s narrative agencies
as compound individuals,’’ by introducing the American process philosopher
Charles Hartshorne who coined the term ‘‘the compound individual’’ to mean
‘‘individual entities compounded of subordinate individual entities.’’ In other words,
‘‘all compound individuals display an ability to respond to their environment and,
regardless of their size, all make an effect on surrounding entities, processes, and
forces.’’ As a foundational figure in new materialist approaches to reality,
Hartshorne brings new materialism, process philosophy, affects, becoming, agency,
life, matter, and nature to bear with each other. Though ignored by critics in this
field, Oppermann tries to salvage Charles Hartshorne and puts him in dialogue with
Manuel De Landa, Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Jeffrey Cohen, Bruno
Latour, and so on. Basing her material ecocriticism on the storied world of living
nature, Oppermann discusses nature’s narrative ability and shows how matter
emerges in meaningfully articulate forms of creative becoming as narrative agency.
Canadian–Korean ecocritic Simon C. Estok, in ‘‘Back abstract: Material
ecocriticism, genes, and the phobia/philia spectrum,’’ considers ecophobia (which
he contrasts with non-ecophobic rational fears, such as of snakes, spiders, and
darkness). In this paper, Estok compares and contrasts the ‘‘biophilia hypothesis’’
and the ‘‘ecophobia hypothesis’’ in order to show that it is ecophobia, not biophilia
that is a causal agent in our social and environmental problems, ‘‘factory farms,
rainforest destruction, the biodiversity holocaust,’’ and so on. In the age of the
Anthropocene, the ecophobia hypothesis offers an analytical paradigm more
grounded in the sobering material realities and histories of human/nonhuman
interactions than the more limited and ‘‘cheerful’’ biophilia hypothesis, which
(Estok urges) is not to deny or diminish the importance of biophilia but rather to see
it as a part of a spectrum. Seeking to understand the ‘‘genetic roots of ecophobia’’ in
order to equip the ecophobia hypothesis with more theoretical vigor, Estok, inspired
by Joseph Carroll’s biocultural theory, Helen Feder’s ecocultural materialism,
Wendy Wheeler’s biosemiotics, and Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino’s
material ecocriticism, brings up the term ‘‘genetic ecocriticism.’’ For Estok, this
type of ecocritical endeavor, fraught though it is with its own inherent dangers,
offers to integrate biology and literature and to enable ecocritics to chart new
theoretical terrain. Estok maintains that ‘‘to do material ecocriticism without
acknowledging and theorizing about the materiality and agency of genes would be
like doing oceanography with acknowledging and theorizing about water.’’
From Italy, Serenella Iovino’s essay ‘‘Sedimenting stories: Italo Calvino and the
extraordinary strata of the anthropocene’’ follows her train of thoughts from
Oppermann and her edited book Material Ecocriticism that, since all matter is ‘‘a
storied matter,’’ ‘‘the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of
agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories.’’ In this
essay, Iovino also maintains that ‘‘matter can be read as a text, and that each of our
encounters with the world—including literary creation and critical interpretation—
is a form of diffraction, an interference that ‘can make a difference in how meanings
are made and lived’.’’ Looking at Italy’s industrial North, but with a gaze at a larger
dynamics, Serenella Iovino uses Italo Calvino’s early urban works as tools for a
‘‘narrative stratigraphy.’’ Calvino’s imaginative dealings with the material world,
she argues, emerges and evolves along with the landscapes of the Anthropocene that
stratify over and within Italy’s bodies.
In a similar vein, Yalan Chang’s ‘‘‘Slowness’ in the anthropocene: Ecological
medicine in Refuge and God’s hotel’’ compares and contrasts two healing
narratives: Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An unnatural history of family and
place (1991) and Victoria Sweet’s God’s hotel: A doctor, a hospital, and a
pilgrimage to the heart of medicine (2012). In Williams’s memoir, ‘‘ten women in
her family have been diagnosed with breast cancer’’ due to the fact that nuclear
testing has been conducted near her hometown—the Nevada Desert. Thus, Yalan
Chang points out that, in Refuge, slow violence via nuclear radiation ‘‘could be the
culprit responsible for decades of cancer diagnoses in people living downwind of
the testing site in Utah.’’ Conversely, Sweet’s God’s hotel highlights the healing
power of ‘‘inhuman agency’’—rocks, sky, waters, the desert, wind, plants, and
animals—to cure people of their diseases. For Chang, ‘‘the body’’ is her point of
view, and by weaving together Joni Adamson’s environmental justice, Rob Nixon’s
slow violence, Priscilla Wald’s structural violence, Stacy Alaimo’s
trans-corporeality, Cohen and Duckert’s elemental ecocriticism, Chang brings the body to bear
with the environment, disease, and new materialisms. To provide an ‘‘antidote’’ to
the age of the Anthropocene, she turns to ecological medicine elements on the
ground that they are ‘‘active forces’’ capable of awakening the healing energy from
within the body.
In Taiwan, Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai and Peter I-min Huang devote themselves to
new materialisms while Dean Brink deals with Badiouan ethics and agential
realism. In recent years, scholars have become interested in Guattari’s
conceptualization of ecology, especially in the ways in which they can learn ecology from
Deleuze and Guattari. Bernd Herzogenrath’s Deleuze/Guattari & ecology sets an
example for reading Deleuze and Guattari as new materialists. According to
Herzogenrath, Deleuze and Guattari, matter is ‘‘molecular material’’ with ‘‘the
capacity for self-organization’’ because ‘‘matter […] is not dead, brute,
homogeneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing singularities or haecceities, qualities
and even operations’’
(Herzogenrath 2009, p. 6)
. Drawing from Herzogenrath’s
ecological insights, Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai’s ‘‘Climate change, chaosmosis, and the
ecosophic object in Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer’’ discusses Guattari’s
ecosophic object in four important aspects: (1) material, energetic and semiotic
Fluxes, (2) concrete and abstract machinic Phylums, (3) virtual Universes of values,
and (4) finite existential Territories. Moreover, Tsai scrutinizes Norman Spinrad’s
Greenhouse Summer in the light of Guattari’s ‘‘chaosmosis’’ with reference to the
crisis of reason, end-time apocalypticism, epistemo-ontological binaries between
mind and matter, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and personal and
social. By way of an object-oriented chaosmosis, Tsai lays bare the politics of
climate change in Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer by looking at the ways in
which corporate capitalism as represented by the Big Blue Machine zeroes in on the
poor countries by selling them climate technology.
In his ‘‘Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake, and Mazu,’’
Peter I-min Huang, following Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, and Gilles Deleuze and
Fe´lix Guattari, adopts a material eco-feminist approach to revisit Taiwanese/
Chinese legends of Nu Wa, White Snake, and Mazu. Huang argues that although
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘body without organs’’ still ‘‘generate[s] considerable
interest among scholars who engage with theories of subjectivity,’’ scholars
underestimate the ‘‘agency’’ of ‘‘the body.’’ As a site of ‘‘disarticulation,’’ Huang
argues, ‘‘the body’’ needs to be reconfigured as an interface, nexus, or middle place
that connects the actual and the virtual, which is the basis of material feminist and
material ecocritical, transcorporeal understandings of ethics and affect. For Huang,
therefore, ‘‘the body without organs’’ is not to be seen as ‘‘a dead body’’ but as a
‘‘living body [that is] all the more ‘alive and teeming once it has blown apart the
organism and its organization.’’’ His study of two Chinese deities—Nu Wa and
Mazu—and the mythical figure White Snake forward an expanded Deleuzean
notion of subjectivity, one that is free from the policing of patriarchal structures. As
Huang also argues, Nu Wa, the ‘‘fixer of skies’’; White Snake, ‘‘a hybrid
femaleanimal creature’’; and Mazu, a ‘‘protector of sailors, fish, fishers, and the sea,’’ all
have played and should continue to play a prominent role in the environmental
justice movement in Taiwan precisely because of their material feminist and
ecocritical significance.
Dean Brink’s ‘‘Affective frames and intra-relational finites in Jorie Graham’s Sea
Change’’ situates Graham’s collection of poems as an ecopolitical text departing
from traditional nature poetry or ecopoetry in part by refusing to engage in
‘‘geographic specificity.’’ Like Serenella, brink is also inspired by physicist and
philosopher Karen Barad, especially her notion of ‘‘intra-actions,’’ to rethink
agencies as ‘‘entanglements.’’ Partly discursive and partly lyrical, Graham’s poetry
can be read in terms of Barad’s post-phenomenological relationality of
‘‘intraactions’’ between the human and nonhuman and complemented by a Badiouan
ethics. In the title poem, the meaning of ‘‘Sea Change’’ is twofold: (1) a sea change
has occurred both in politics (the Invasion of Iraq based on lies) and in reaching a
transformative tipping point in global warming; (2) it is also a pun suggesting to
‘‘see change.’’ For Brink, Jorie Graham’s Sea Change exemplifies a new model for
ecopoetry and antiwar poetry, in that her poetry is characterized by ‘‘a slippage
between transitive and intransitive, inner force and outer pressures, transhuman
dimensions and posthuman non humanities.’’ Arguing against representationalism,
neoliberalism, American exceptionalism, fixed ontology, and the ‘‘androcentric’’
object-oriented ecocritical explorations, Brink not only adopts a ‘‘feminist discourse
on shared responsibility and frames of otherness that include selves as posthumanist
and inter-relational across species and among various forms of shared material
organization,’’ but also looks at Badiou as an ally to further his argument on ‘‘acts’’
of literature. For him, ‘‘[p]oetry becomes a lyric dimension not of escape but
recovery of our responsibility.’’
From Hungary, Pe´ter Hajdu’s paper ‘‘The rights of trees: on a Hungarian short
story from 1900’’ starts with the first poem ‘‘Two Trees’’ in Scottish poet Don
Paterson’s Rain to alert us to the attention of the ontological rift between two kinds
of interpretation: a humanist reading and an ecohumanist reading. The former
emphasizes human norms and values (such as Ms. L) while the latter attempts to
‘‘think like trees’’ (such as the narrator). In this essay, Pe´ter Hajdu follows the latter,
and his materially ecocritical analysis of Ka´lma´n Miksza´th’s ‘‘The Heiress Trees’’
as a ‘‘thought experiment’’ pays special attention to an ethical paradox: What if we
regard the non-human world as having rights? For Hajdu, this short story has ‘‘a plot
that starts in 1736 and ends in the 1860s,’’ which insinuates that the story is either
too ‘‘old-fashioned’’ with ‘‘slow and uneconomical narration’’ or a traditional
narratorial structure that requires 130 years to accommodate ‘‘its backstory, main
story and epilogue.’’ Like Yalan Chang’s treatment of plants as agents capable of
meaning-production, Hajdu’s alternative interpretation of the trees as the
‘‘wenarrator’’ also gives the trees a [narratorial] voice. Thus, the story is seen not
through a human eye but the trees’ eyes and the subject of the story is not about the
human life, but ‘‘their [the trees’] life, or rather their right to life.’’ Lately, critical
plant studies has become one of the nascent but important ecocritical practices.
Michael Marder’s Plant-thinking: A philosophy of vegetal life (2013) laid out the
foundation of such a type of ecocriticism to rebut the presumption of treating plants
as non-objects which are obscure, voiceless, and soulless. Similar claims are made
that, historically, plants, trees, or other nonhuman objects are regarded as ‘‘inert,
passive, background objects,’’ devalued, ignored, and disposable
(Stark 2015,
p. 181)
. Thus, Marder suggests going beyond human/nonhuman binary since
humans and nonhumans have common interests. One of the critiques directed at this
type of argument is ethically-oriented human projections based on
anthropomorphism since it would sound dubious to confer human rights to trees. In his treatment,
Hajdu tries to look at the both with a possibility of hinting at an ecology of a
natureoriented mind: ‘‘The result is a paradigm shift we can nowadays make use of,
accepting that justice is not or should not be limited to the human sphere.’’
In ‘‘Back to the city: Urban agriculture and the reimagining of agrarianism in
Novella Carpenter’s Farm City,’’ Shiuhhuah Serena Chou argues that urban
agriculture, a seemingly oxymoron, suggests something more than a simple
transplantation of the rural small-family farming practice celebrated by agrarianism.
By carefully examining Oregon-based urban farmer Novella Carpenter’s Farm city:
The education of an urban farmer (2009), Chou shows that urban agriculture has
uncovered the agronomic and spiritual potentialities of contemporary American
inner cities by calling attention to the material agencies of urban matters and
entities. Based on Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s eco-materialist
observation that the world is a matter ‘‘far from being a ‘pure exterior’’’ and filled
with ‘‘intermingling agencies and forces that persist and change over eons,’’ Chou
finds that Carpenter redefines cities as vibrant material beings in constant processes
of becoming and generating an interconnected web of (biotic) community relations.
Farming in the city not only debunks American agrarianism’s celebration of rurality
through a rigid urban-as-barrenness/rural-as-abundance cultural binary but expands
traditional agrarian notions of interconnectedness and stewardship to both the urban
poor and the nonhuman entities and matters.
Hsinya Huang’s ‘‘After Hiroshima: radiation ecologies in the trans-indigenous
Pacific’’ uses Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 as an anchor text to
explore radiation ecologies in the trans-Pacific, trans-indigenous context.
‘‘Radiation ecologies’’ is a term borrowed from postcolonial ecocritic Elizabeth
DeLoughrey’s 2009 essay ‘‘Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light.’’ In this
article, Huang focuses her attention on the interactions of Ronin Browne and
Manidoo Envoy. Ronin is a hafu, a mixed blood Japanese; his mother was a
Japanese bugi dancer, Okichi, and possibly an Ainu, a member of Japan’s
indigenous people; his father was a Native American named Nightbreaker, an
Anishinaabe from the White Earth Reservation. Manidoo Envoy is a native
American who was a friend of Ronin’s father. It is the character Ronin who in
person links the indigenous peoples across the Pacific and who decries the hypocrisy
of the Peace Memorial Park at Hiroshima and the history of Japanese and American
militarization and empire building leading up to the dropping of atom bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. The Pacific region has been the site of
multiple nuclear tests over many decades, and it is the indigenous populations that
have suffered from these tests and their aftermath. And it is also the indigenous
populations that, in resisting and surviving, provide alternative ways of envisioning
and positioning the human possibilities of ‘‘survivance’’ in the face of such
catastrophic consequences.
In ‘‘An animal studies and ecocritical reading of animal hunting in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight,’’ Iris Ralph reads a text that continues to interest and
challenge scholars notwithstanding existing critical studies addressing the poem
within as well as outside of both animal studies and ecocriticism where little room
have left for further inquiry. Ralph begins by briefly summarizing the history of the
poem’s critical reception inclusive of recent arguments by animal studies scholars
and ecocriticism scholars who specialize in medieval literature. Their arguments, as
Ralph recapitulates, are revolving around ethical, conceptual, and cognitive
distinctions between humans and animals in the medieval period. Citing the work
of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Susan Crane, and Gillian Rudd, as well as a study by the
animal philosopher Paola Cavalieri that examines classical attitudes toward and
assumptions about animals that influences Christian theological doctrine in the
medieval period, Ralph focuses on the triple hunt scenes of the poem. As she argues,
its lesson in honesty or truth (trawþe), the first of the chivalric virtues of a knight,
does not stop at the bounds of ‘‘the human’’ but extends into terrain that raises
questions about the kinds of deceit and evasion—reasonable and not so
reasonable—that humans practice on species other than their own. Specifically,
she argues that the detailed and graphic descriptions of the hunting and slaughter of
deer, a boar, and a fox do not function only or chiefly as an ingenuous rhetorical foil
to the playful toying, baiting, and trapping of Gawain by Bertilak at Hautdesert, or
as content that reflects medieval codes of courtly conduct and social hierarchy. Past
scholars, as Ralph emphasizes, have read the issue of Gawain’s dishonesty and the
Green Knight’s exposure of it in manifestly anthropocentric moral terms. For Ralph,
‘‘[W]hat is not entirely satisfying’’ about that ‘‘standard reading’’ lies in the fact that
it ‘‘omits the issue of another untruth,’’ one that is as difficult to rationalize in the
time of the Gawain-poet as it is in our own time: the deceptions that humans
practice on animals as well as on members of their own species in the ‘‘hunting’’ of
them for entertainment or sport.
In this special issue, all the papers focus on both fictional and non-fictional
textual representations of speculative grace while paying particular attention to the
ambivalence of humanist subjects and the unsustainable system of exploitation of
the nonhuman. In their multiple crossings across theoretical, generic as well as
geographical boundaries, all the authors in this special issue approach literary and
cultural texts from a wide spectrum of transcultural positions in order to explore
(eco)critical issues in speculative materialism in the hope of significantly expanding
this field of study.
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Brassier , R. ( 2014 ). Postscript: Speculative autopsy . In P. Wolfendale (Ed.), Object-oriented philosophy: The noumenon's new clothes (pp. 401 - 421 ). Falmouth: Urbanomic.
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Harman , G. ( 2013 ). Bells and whistles: More speculative realism . Alresford: Zero.
Herzogenrath , B. ( 2009 ). Deleuze/Guattari & ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Iovino , S. , & Oppermann , S. ( 2014 ). Introduction: Stories come to matter . In S. Iovino & S. Oppermann (Eds.), Material ecocriticism (pp. 1 - 17 ). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Meillassoux , Q. ( 2008 ). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency (trans: Brassier , R. ). New York: Continuum.
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